This is a documentary that demands a large bucket of popcorn.

By contrast to the previous rendition’s warm geniality, Oakley’s film is much more concerned with the messiness of 19th century life  —  dust and dirt ring the hemlines of long dresses, fingernails are rough and often filthy, and the natural world surrounds the sisters in its sweep. The film often cuts from the human characters in various states of emotional upheaval to a bird swooping in the sky, or a herd of deer glancing up in alarm. Spider webs are frequently invoked, and the film has far more dogs in it than Austen herself might have imagined.

It all feels perhaps a skooch played out, by this point, especially since an enormous percentage of such post-Jaws flicks (including several of the Jaws’ sequels) have been mindless, idiotic moneygrabs, with shameful CGI effects, and a slew of wooden, one-dimensional characters to use as chum in the water. This aggressively bland film is next in a long line of grubby, shoddy and spiritless fare —  in fact, it’s not even the first film to have come up with a plane crash in the Pacific as its primary hook (2024’s No Way Out) .